The Secular Religion Of The Left

Ann Althouse makes an interesting point, in the process of wondering why gun statistics are overinflated:

It occurred to me, after the Sandy Hook murders, that blaming guns is a secular substitute for blaming the devil. People find it too challenging to figure out why a human being would do this terrible thing and they latch on to the idea that the gun made it happen. Suicide presents a similar challenge, and one way to fathom it is to say: It was the gun. Isn’t it like saying the devil made him do it? The gun/the devil is a great go-to answer, freeing you from wracking your brain about the workings of the human mind.

For all their claims of being “progressive,” and “reality-based,” and “pro-science,” the workings of a leftist mind are remarkably primitive.

5 thoughts on “The Secular Religion Of The Left”

Isn’t it odd that at the same time the medical community honchos are talking about rewriting the psychiatric guide, so that it includes 90% of humanity having some sort of mental aberration, the Left wants to blame the GUNS and not the aberrant people who do the killing?

Humans being selfish and in some cases short sighted accounts for human behavior far better than “evil inanimate object made me do it.” This includes much of the behavior of the left.
Not much can be humanly done about self interest, and a person without self interest wouldn’t take care of themselves, but curing short sightedness would go a long ways towards blunting the ill effects.

Magical thinking on the Left can be seen most clearly in the case of nuclear energy, which is treated as though it were cursed. This is sometimes combined with worship of solar energy. This actually makes sense when you consider that Secular Humanism Release 1.0, otherwise known as Epicurean philosophy, included the theory that all natural phenomena were due to the movement of atoms in the void.

If natural phenomena are only due to rearrangements of atoms, those phenomena due to other causes must be supernatural. In particular, nuclear fission or the sun’s luminosity are classed as supernatural. If “black magic” is defined as a supernatural phenomenon summoned by the will of the sorceror then nukes are clearly black magic. Sunlight, on the other hand, is freely given by the Sun so, by the same standards, we have a holy obligation to accept it.